When antimatter collides with matter it can end up creating the largest explosion in human history. So, what's their working theory as to why our evil antimatter twins didn't just cancel everything out, long ago? "One particle is left over out of a billion, and this one particle out of a billion is everything we see in the Universe. This is generally ignoring the radiation effect of all the gamma rays, that might change the maths. However, the mean free path is so short at ambient pressure that they will react before going far (doing it in the upper atmosphere might produce a much larger and fuzzier fireball). Can we add matter and antimatter to the universe? Or would it be similar to a Fat Man Bomb? In John Barnes' excellent Thousand Cultures series, the ultimate nasty weapon is the teleportation of antimatter into the atmosphere as a very fine dust spread over a large volume. Sorry, but I don't know where you can get the text of this book online. This wave leads to an abrupt increase in pressure. [2], The "megaton (of TNT equivalent)" is a unit of energy equal to 4.184 petajoules (4.1841015J). Did you get it? Often, the responses are droll ones such as love, cocaine, cash money, computer ink, or even sex. The antihydrogen gets stuck in the area with the weakest magnetic field. It only takes a minute to sign up. any large scale destruction of a city, with non antimatter device, on earth of a nuclear ready country would trigger mutually assured destruction, in what is estimated to be a thousand times over. The word "antimatter" is not even mentioned anywhere in your question. The time of interaction is very short. The blast radius is the distance up to which the explosion will have an effect. Or would it be more like a conventional ~50kg artillery shell? "You need 2,000 times more energy to make [anti-protons]," he says. But this result isnt bizarre at allits simply a confirmation of earlier, but less precise, measurements of the antiprotons magnetic moment. We have a mole of atoms in a gram, or a total energy release of (2 GeV)(6 x 10^23)(1.6 x 10^-19 J/eV) = 2 x 10^14 J, or 200 terajoules. [3] Cost [ edit] Now they're back in Kyiv, Baby with bowel obstruction died after hospital's failures, coroner finds, NT Chief Minister apologises to outgoing police commissioner over retirement settlement comments, Nouma is an island paradise but for the next year you're not allowed to swim, Live: Celebrities arrive at the Met Gala for fashion's biggest night, Texas college baseball player accidentally shot during game, Three firefighters rushed to hospital, one critical, after factory fire south of Brisbane, Live: Reserve Bank tipped to leave interest rates on hold for a second month, ASX to open lower. Scientists estimate creating and storing a gram of antimatter would cost in excess of a million billion dollars and require about 25 million billion kilowatt-hours of energy. You get high-energy (~100 MeV) gammas, medium-energy (e.g., 511 keV) gammas, pions, muons, and neutrinos. The neutrinos will carry away a fraction of the energy but the rest will heat the vicinity into a fireball. By clicking Accept all cookies, you agree Stack Exchange can store cookies on your device and disclose information in accordance with our Cookie Policy. But why do so many Christians still claim that God used the Big Bang to create the universe, especially when this scientifically bankrupt speculation contradicts the Genesis creation account in so many ways?5 The Big Bang is, and always has been, unsupported speculation. "Kiloton" redirects here. They dont allow anything to shake their commitment to the Big Bang story, even the conclusion that our universe shouldnt exist if the Big Bang were true! Why do you say "pure gamma"? For instance, the antimatter equivalent to the electron is called the positron. When the Tsar Bomba was tested in Russia it produced such a large fireball that it could be seen from 620 miles away. Take a proton (a charged subatomic particle) 2. rev2023.5.1.43405. And yet, there is very little antimatter in the universeso its been a known problem for many years. So to kill all humans you need 406,900 kg of antimatter. Supposing we had one antimatter bomb (it has to be detonated in one particular location, but it can be as big as necessary, even as big as an entire city), how much antimatter would we need in order to eradicate all animals on Earth? I have no idea how to get that in an antimatter bomb, because of the fizzle problem noted above. If the Big Bang led to equal parts matter and antimatter forming, these probably would have then bumped into each other, obliterated one another, and then presumably exploded again. [5], Antimatter-catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion proposes the use of antimatter as a "trigger"[6] to initiate small nuclear explosions; the explosions provide thrust to a spacecraft. Similarly, you can estimate the blast radius for c4 explosives too. TNT equivalent is a convention for expressing energy, typically used to describe the energy released in an explosion. Mathematically, the ratio of the weight of the explosives (W and W) is proportional to the ratio of the cube of range (R and R), i.e. A minor scale definition: am I missing something? Which was the first Sci-Fi story to predict obnoxious "robo calls"? ", "Mount St. Helens -- From the 1980 Eruption to 2000, Fact Sheet 036-00", "USGS Earthquake Hazards Program: Energy and Broadband Solution: OFF W COAST OF NORTHERN SUMATRA", Currently deployed U.S. nuclear weapon yields, Complete List of All U.S. Nuclear Weapons, "Energetic output of the 2022 Hunga TongaHunga Ha'apai volcanic eruption from pressure measurements", "The eruption of Krakatoa, August 27, 1883", "Nuclear Weapons: Who Has What at a Glance", "Global nuclear weapons: downsizing but modernizing", Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, "Minimize Harm and Security Risks of Nuclear Energy", "Hurricane FAQ NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory", "Tambora 1815: Just How Big Was The Eruption? It was created by an international team of scientists at CERN. Professor Doser and his colleagues need anti-protons. The problem you'll quickly run into is that the Earth is big. The blast radius is merely an indicative number, and it is still UNSAFE to be anywhere close to the blast radius in a real-world scenario. (On a much bigger scale to be sure -- it's not a good thing to have around the neighborhood.). The best chemical rockets, like NASA's Space Shuttle main engine, max out at around 450 seconds, which means a pound of fuel will produce a pound of thrust for 450 seconds. Would one atom of antimatter be lethal if annihilated inside the brain? This one bullet would be equivalent to 378 grams of TNT, which is more powerful than a modern grenade. Interaction with the blast wave can cause severe injuries (see injury severity score calculator) depending on the stand-off distance. This bomb was only 50 megatons. [2] Annihilation requires and converts exactly equal masses of antimatter and matter by the collision which releases the entire mass-energy of both, which for 1 gram is ~91013 joules. achieving the specified result. A blast wave unleashes a large amount of energy that causes changes in pressure and temperature along its path. Of course, getting even a milligram of antimatter is going to be tou. 2 * (mass of earth) * c^2 And the answer is $1.0735089\times10^{42}$ J (joules) Wolfram Alpha gave the following helpful equivalency: $( \frac{1}{93} )\times$ energy released from a supernova $(\approx 1\times 10 . But because this claim is not based on any empirical science, its never been anything more than pure speculation. Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience. A Tsar Bomb? Today, it takes nearly a year for an unmanned spacecraft to reach Mars. Total solar output in all directions per day. Making statements based on opinion; back them up with references or personal experience. [10], Such differences can be substantial. Professor Doser actually thinks matter might be the evil half of this equation, with antimatter being the "good guy". Comparing with nuclear weapons, this is about 50 kton TNT. How much antimatter would we need in order to wipe out all humans, eradicate all animals and blow up the Earth? It uses a magnet to keep antimatter on the inside from interacting with the walls of the trap and exploding. The energy released by a hurricane per day during condensation. However, humans have produced only a minuscule amount of antimatter. Professor Doser leads a team studying this strange, expensive, explosive stuffin the wonderfully named Antimatter Factory. "So this is by far the most energetic process that you can think of.". Check your math. It's the most expensive substance on Earth, costing quadrillions of dollars for a single gram. In other words, for each gram of TNT exploded, 4.184 kilojoules (or 4184 joules) of energy are released. To create antimatter you just need to create matter. However for only $600,000 you could fit a 10 millionth of a gram of antimatter into a snipers bullet. Lesser known is its role in studying the anti-particles of the Universe. The gammas then scatter of air molecules, transferring the energy into heat. Energy = With about 100,000 ships out there, that's a lot of survivors. Learn how and when to remove this template message, Antimatter-catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion, "Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons / Program was touted publicly, then came official gag order", "Laser technique produces bevy of antimatter", "Details on antimatter triggered fusion bombs - NextBigFuture.com", "Angels & Demons: The Physics Behind The Movie (and The Book)", "Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons: Program was touted publicly, then came official gag order", Page discussing the possibility of using antimatter as a trigger for a thermonuclear explosion, Paper discussing the number of antiprotons required to ignite a thermonuclear weapon, Safety of high-energy particle collision experiments, Existential risk from artificial intelligence, Self-Indication Assumption Doomsday argument rebuttal, Self-referencing doomsday argument rebuttal, List of dates predicted for apocalyptic events, List of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Antimatter_weapon&oldid=1139434888, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles needing additional references from August 2020, All articles needing additional references, Articles containing potentially dated statements from 2004, All articles containing potentially dated statements, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 15 February 2023, at 03:22. Learn more about Stack Overflow the company, and our products. Now we need to know how this works in tons. When the antimatter starts reacting antiprotons and positrons will be kicked away, mixing with the air. Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings. So not only would they be more powerful than nukes, but also more likely to be used on people. The previous answer covered the bases fairly well for options 1 and 3. If you wanted to capture antihydrogen without it getting annihilated, then you would have to use something called a loffe trap. 1 Answer. Likewise, the antimatter counterpart to a proton is the anti-proton which has the same mass as a proton but with a negative charge. "We want to study it to see why it's not here anymore and why the Universe isn't just empty.". Remove a chunk from a planet? So in this Big Bang scenario, particles and antiparticles would have been coming into existence and then annihilating one another in equal measure. By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform. A gram of antimatter could produce an explosion the size of a nuclear bomb. NASA have actually started planning to use antimatter spaceships to go to space. In order to store antimatter it has to be kept in a sealed container and held up with magnets so that it floats. Still a big bang. Antimatter is just like normal matter, except that some of its properties are opposite that of normal matter. Taken shamelessly from my previous answer here. This enables engineers to determine the proper masses of different explosives when applying blasting formulas developed specifically for TNT. For safety purposes a range as wide as 26736702J has been stated for a gram of TNT upon explosion. If the null hypothesis is never really true, is there a point to using a statistical test without a priori power analysis? An antimatter weapon is a theoretically possible device using antimatter as a power source, a propellant, or an explosive for a weapon. MathJax reference. Let's shoot to heat up the atmosphere by 200K; there's no way anyone's surviving that. We must use a bigger bomb. No, the only way to be sure is to be thorough. By clicking Post Your Answer, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy. The damage done to the biosphere here is more due to pressure and heat than radioactivity. Was Aristarchus the first to propose heliocentrism? Both antimatter and matter were created after the big bang, and the universe should be made up of 50% matter, and 50% antimatter. The positron has the same mass as an electron but with a positive charge, rather than negative. In other words, for each gram of TNT exploded, 4.184kilojoules (or 4,184 joules) of energy are released. Something like this would probably be your optimal (in terms of parsimonious use of anti matter, anyway) approach for #1 and #2. Now, if we were sloppy, we would just pepper the land area of $148,300,000 km^2$, so about 1,236 MIEVs (Multiple Independently Targetable Entry Vehicles) with 100 2kg warheads each would do. We have to double the figure because that's the antimatter mass, and we're converting that mass of antimatter plus an equal mass of matter into energy. It's one antiparticle per hour, approximately," Professor Doser says. I mean like a lot of people I've looked at the "NukeMap" website and gone "Wow, the Tsar Bomb really is pretty destructive", what would the Enterprise-D crashing into a city look like by comparison. However small scale antimatter weapons are much more affordable, as I mentioned earlier you can create a bullet with a 10 millionth of a gram of antimatter in it for only $600,000. Antimatter weapons are currently too costly and unreliable to be viable in warfare, as producing antimatter is enormously expensive (estimated at $6 billion for every 100 nanograms), the quantities of antimatter generated are very small, and current technology has great difficulty containing antimatter, which annihilates upon touching ordinary matter. The energy output that would be released by a typical, The approximate radiated surface energy released in a magnitude 8, The complete conversion of 1kg of matter into pure energy would yield. This means that although equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have formed, they weren't quite equal, he adds. The TNT explosion radius becomes: In case of ranges where the public access is denied, the blast radius becomes: Energy from different sources Indeed this is a polar-explosion (1 gamma to one side and the other to opposite side). When a collision between a particle and its opposing antiparticle collide, both of them are annihilated which causes a massive release of energy, otherwise known as an explosion. [1], The paramount advantage of such a theoretical weapon is that antimatter and matter collisions result in the entire sum of their mass energy equivalent being released as energy, which is at least two orders of magnitude greater than the energy release of the most efficient fusion weapons (100% vs 0.4-1%). If those are still fairly small numbers, how big would the Enterprise D exploding really be? CAUTION Except the isochoric heat capacity of earth atmosphere is $C_v=.717kJ*kg^{-1}*K^{-1}$. What positional accuracy (ie, arc seconds) is necessary to view Saturn, Uranus, beyond? That gives you a nice $1,200 km^2$ blast incineration area. The cost of creating antimatter like this makes it the world's most expensive substance. Using the convention that 1 kiloton TNT equivalent = 4.1841012 joules (or one trillion calories of energy), one half gram of antimatter reacting with one half gram of ordinary matter (one gram total) results in 21.5 kilotons-equivalent of energy (the same as the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945). The same technology could theoretically be used to make very small and possibly "fission-free" (very low nuclear fallout) weapons (see pure fusion weapon). ", "Beirut Explosion: What Happened in Lebanon and Everything Else You Need to Know", "Preliminary yield estimation of the 2020 Beirut explosion using video footage from social media", "Seismic Experiments on the North German Explosions, 1946 to 1947", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, "Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Long Term Health Effects", "Kinetic Energy of Tornadoes in the United States", "Frequently Asked Questions Electricity", "Country Comparison:: Electricity consumption", "NOAA FAQ: How much energy does a hurricane release? But case 2 deserves a better answer after all anti-matter is not cheap and they are always out of stock at Home Depot. But in Star Trek Generations, the Enterprise D is destroyed (or at least the Star Drive Section) in a massive explosion when they lose antimatter containment, and it has 3,000 m of antimatter storage. Also your question only speaks about blowing up a planet completely, whereas my questions number 1 and 2 only speak about killing all humans and all animals respectively which is very different (your question very clearly states near the end "I dont just want to destroy all life on the surface, I want to reduce the entire planet to rubble so that very little remains"). An antimatter weapon is a weapon which would use antimatter as a power source, a propellant or an explosive. The stand-off distance is: The Hopkinson-Cranz equation is useful for estimating safety distances for explosives. How to force Unity Editor/TestRunner to run at full speed when in background? Could a subterranean river or aquifer generate enough continuous momentum to power a waterwheel for the purpose of producing electricity? I was planning on adding more to this response, but I think Serban covered it as well as I can for numbers #1 and #2. Matter-antimatter annihilation from a hypothetical macroscopic explosion would produce the same particles as proton-antiproton annihilation in microscopic quantities in accelerator experiments. Hence why I'm thinking they may have tried to say "Nope, 3,000m of Antimatter would really only be an explosion this big" as opposed to "Something as big as your hand would utterly level half of Rome" which is significantly smaller than 3,000m. "[When] a proton and antiproton annihilate each other, their mass completely disappears," Professor Dosersays. Calculating a single RE factor for an explosive is, however, impossible. How much energy would be released in a collision of planets of matter & antimatter? Multiplying by the mass of the atmosphere $M_{atm}=5.1*10^{18}$ gives us how much energy it takes to heat the atmosphere by 1 degree Kelvin, $C_v*M_{atm}=3.6567*10^{18}kJ*K^{-1}$. One in every million collisions creates a proton-antiproton pair. You can also convert entire earth into energy but you have to look for antimatter earth to do it. Would it be similarly anti-climactic? It's not them. How are engines numbered on Starship and Super Heavy? The blast radius for the 1 kg bare explosive detonation is 130 m. This answer is obtained by using the range safety equation, based on Hopkinson-Cranz Law: R = 130 W(1/3) = 130 1(1/3) = 130 m The intensity of the blast wave front is inversely proportional to the cube of the distance. "It would take us 10 billion years to assemble enough anti-stuff to make the bomb Dan Brown talks . ", "Beirut Blast: How does yield of 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate compare against Halifax explosion, Hiroshima bombing? [4], Alternative values for TNT equivalency can be calculated according to which property is being compared and when in the two detonation processes the values are measured. Now you can destroy all life on earth using only about 6E4 kg of antimatter, only 60 metric tons of the good stuff. 2014 The Institute of Makers of Explosives. Speed it up enormously 3. All of the antiprotons created at Fermilab's Tevatron particle accelerator add up to only 15 nanograms. By Snell's law, determine the incident angle by using our angle of incidence calculator. Unlike Big Bang speculation, these measurements, which are testable and repeatable, were real science. For example, if a timber-cutting formula calls for a charge of 1kg of TNT, then based on octanitrocubane's RE factor of 2.38, it would take only 1.0/2.38 (or 0.42) kg of it to do the same job. The storage rings on the spacecraft will hold the antimatter. Well, in theory if you mix one gram of matter with one gram of antimatter you should get 1.810 14 joules of energy or about 43 kilotons. $3.6567*10^{18}kJ*K^{-1} * 200K=7.31310^{20} kJ$. Using the convention that 1 kiloton TNT equivalent = 4.18410 12 joules (or one trillion calories of energy), one half gram of antimatter reacting with one half gram of ordinary matter (one gram total) results in 21.5 kilotons-equivalent of energy (the same as the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945). Professor Doser once estimated how muchit would cost to make antimatter in large amounts. And if you're concerned that this work doesn't warrant fooling around with such a violently explosive anti-substance, Professor Doser says there's no need to worry. 1 gram of antimatter explosion radius. Estimated mass-energy of the observable universe. Collisions between high-energy photons can result in a pair of matter/antimatter particles. The estimated energy at impact when the largest fragment of, Estimates in 2010 show that the kinetic energy of the. The RE factor is the relative mass of TNT to which an explosive is equivalent: The greater the RE, the more powerful the explosive. The human body also releases antimatter. The reality is that. But it's really not that big of an explosion. Antimatter is the opposite of matter. The solar irradiance of the Sun every 12 hours. Though one of the answer does say that we would need 1.3 trillion tonnes of antimatter to blow up the Earth.
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